Category: Middle East

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Mazar-e-Sharif

Mazar-e-Sharif

The publication, in New Zealand, of Hit & Run by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson has drawn our attention to the remote Tigran valley, north of Kabul, in the millisphere of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Tigran is divided from Kabul by a high mountain range, and those wanting a description of the countryside should read Eric Newby’s travel writing classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

Tigran, in the Baghlan province, is situated on the historic trade route from Kabul north to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, but the New Zealand SAS wouldn’t have followed Newby’s horseback route; they would have taken a one-hour flight directly to Baghlan. Quicker and safer.

I discussed dividing Afghanistan into millispheres with a friend, who had worked for the Red Cross in Kabul in 1991.

Shew said Afghanistan had never really been one country, but a collection of regions dominated by ethnic warlords. For a start the country is roughly 85 percent Sunni Muslim and 15 percent Shi’a.

Kabul is the fifth fastest growing city in the world; a decade ago it didn’t qualify as a millisphere but now, with an urban population around 3.7 million, it does.

Kabul is roughly 45 percent Tajik, 25 percent Hazara and 25 percent Pashtun, and these three ethnic groups are spread throughout the country in roughly those proportions.

Baghlan province, where the NZ SAS Operation Burnham took place, is in a region dominated by the “northern alliance” of Tajiks and Uzbeks. Mazar-e-Sharif, after the largest city in the region, is the name I’ve given this millisphere, and geophysically it is the upper Amu Darya river catchment that drains north into the Aral Sea.

North is also the direction Afghanistan’s opium takes on its journey to the West.

When the Taliban seized control in 1996, opium production fell to less than 20 percent of what it was during the decade long 1980s Russian/Mujahideen war.

Since the American invasion in 2001, opium production has climbed to greater than pre-Taliban levels – despite the Americans spending $US7.6 billion on poppy eradication programmes.

During the Russian occupation, the Americans supplied money and arms to the Mujahideen. Joining this “jihad” against the Russians were 25,000 Arab fighters including one Osama bin Laden, who famously turned from being an ally of convenience to a sworn enemy of the US.

Working in Wellington earlier this decade, I met Monroe, a Maori soldier, who after serving his time in the New Zealand Army, signed up with the US-led ISAF and worked in Kabul, training Afghan armed forces.

His take on the situation was that only those on the bottom in Afghan society would sign up with the invaders. He called recruits “homos and junkies” whom he thought would never beat the Taliban.

It is estimated that the Taliban have only 25,000 farmer/fighters in the field. Despite a ratio of 12:1 in favour of the US and its allies, backed by sophisticated military equipment, the Taliban still control large areas of Afghanistan.

Before the Taliban, Baghlan province was controlled by the Hazara warlord Sadat Jafat Naderi who belongs to the Ismaili Shi’a sect which comprises about 20 percent of all Shi’a Muslims. There are about six million Ismaili Shi’a in Afghanistan and about 25 million worldwide.

The Ismaili Shi’a give their allegiance to the Aga Khan who, with a personal wealth of $US800 million, is one of the richest royals in the world. The current Aga Khan was born in Geneva to an English mother and lives in France.

The Taliban use asymmetrical warfare, such as suicide bombers, and their sanctuary over the border in the Pashtun tribal areas in Pakistan mean they are still a force to be reckoned with.

In the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great said: “May the Gods keep you away from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the revenge of the Afghans”.

The New Zealand army lost four soldiers during its time in Afghanistan; Britain lost 450 and the Americans 2,300.

Should we have been there and identified as a ally of the American?

As the Dutch said before becoming one of the first Nato countries to bail out: “We came to help rebuild, not to take sides in a civil war”.

The Dutch also couldn’t stomach the corruption.

 

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Palestine

Millisphere, n. a discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

map Palestine

The millisphere of Palestine (between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea) is the habitat of approximately 13 million people; roughly half of them are Arab and the other half Jewish. The West Bank and Gaza have about 4.5 million people (including more than half a million Jewish settlers) and Israel has another 8.5 million (Jews and Arabs).

About a 100 years ago the population of Palestine was about 10 per cent Jewish, and in 1947, before the creation of the modern state of Israel, there were just fewer than two million people in Palestine, of whom about 30 per cent were Jewish.

The Christmas Eve 2016 United Nations resolution, co-sponsored by New Zealand, censuring Israel for continuing to build settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, has rekindled debate about the feasibility of a two-state solution.

In 2004 the American Rand Corporation undertook a feasibility study called “the Arc,” which visualised a Palestinian state, linking Gaza with the West Bank.

The United Nations is predicting that Gaza will be uninhabitable by 2020 unless Israel allows urgent infrastructure repairs. In millisphere terms the numbers work for this two-state solution, but it is unlikely to happen under the present Netanyahu Israeli administration.

A geophysical two-state solution, dividing the water catchments into two, one draining west into the Mediterranean and the other east into the Dead Sea, once again satisfies the millisphere population requirements but confronts problematic water politics (the Israelis control all the water).

Theoretically, one could divide Palestine into two millispheres: one for Jews and one for Arabs, but in practical terms these peoples are too mixed together for that.

The only other solution for peace is for everyone to learn to live together in one state, but this would require the Zionists to give up on their ideal of an exclusively Jewish state.

In the late 19th century, in the Russian empire, after suffering a series of pogroms at the hands of Orthodox Christian Russians, there was a debate among Russian Jews about organised emigration. Locations such as Siberia and Uganda were considered but eventually the USA and Israel were chosen as destinations.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the first Israeli president to have been born in Israel, the rest have been immigrants.

Both sides of Netanyahu’s family originated in the Russian empire, one side going early on, directly from Belarus, before Israel existed as a state, the other side went via the US. The Netanyahus represent the new demography of Palestine, religiously Jewish but genetically Slavic and with American connections.

This stream of emigrants from Eastern Europe continues to this day. Under Israel’s “law of return” anybody with one Jewish grandparent can automatically claim Israeli citizenship for his or her family on arrival.

Unemployed Ukrainians are today choosing to start a new life as settlers in the Palestinian occupied territories, encouraged by the Israeli state. Meanwhile there is no “law of return” for the approximately five million Palestinian refugees, two million in the occupied territories and another three million in Jordan, Syrian and Lebanon.

After the Christmas Eve UN resolution (referred to by Prime Minister Netanyahu as a “declaration of war on Israel”), the New Zealand Jewish Council has called on the governments of New Zealand and Israel to work together to keep the Israeli embassy in Wellington open. Not missing the business opportunity, Jewish Council spokeswoman Juliet Moses said the embassy played a vital role in facilitating business links and that Israel had much to offer New Zealand in the fields of security and counter-terrorism.

In 2007 Israel handled 10 per cent of the global arms and security trade and in 2014 was the world’s sixth-largest arms exporter.

Not bad for a country with 0.1% of the world’s population. Israel continues to be the USA’s single largest military aid recipient – on average about $US 3billion (4.30b) a year. Warfare is big business.

Religion lies at the very heart of the Palestinian conflict. Monotheism (there is only one god, and it’s my god) easily leads to the creation of “the other”, as the Christian Palestinian philosopher Edward Said pointed out.

Non-monotheism on the other hand recognises that there is my god, and your god and his and her gods, and they are all different, so let’s get on with the job at hand.

Thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal would be good places to start and $US 3billion a year would go a long way to rebuild bombed-out Gaza.

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Syria (part two)

Asi, Halab, Furat, Rojava – and the three-step peace plan for Syria.

Imaginary speech to the United Nations Security Council.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nation Security Council, in our speech last week we said that the conflict in Syria was a proxy war between Russia and America. In this our second speech, we declare once again that empires cause war and we put forward a peace plan based on this supposition.

The first step of our peace plan we call “Russki and Yankee go home.” Russia must give up its Mediterranean naval and air bases in Latakia and withdraw from Syria. The United States has military personnel stationed in 133 countries around the world and it is high time for them to all go home, starting with those in the Middle East. All other member states of the United Nations must then halt arms sales to the various parties to the Syrian conflict.

The second step we call the “Millistate solution,” based on a proposal by the Marquis of Bath: that to avoid warring empires the world should consist of one thousand roughly equal population states. This means the creation of states with an average population of around seven million people.

The third step we call the “Bio-region solution.” When drawing the boundaries of these new “millistates” we should attempt to follow geophysical boundaries not geopolitical ones – ideally water catchments and river systems. We propose redrawing the map of Syria into the separate regions where the various factions have dug in and ground to a halt. Some of these millistates will straddle the borders of neighbouring countries.

The Asi River catchment and Damascus together form the millistate of Asi. It includes the Russian base at Latakia and a small piece of Turkey that the Asi flows through on its last few kilometres to the Mediterranean. Safely wrapped around their ally “sister Lebanon” Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite, Shia aligned clan can remain in charge and the military bases in Latakia can be converted into holiday parks for sun starved Russian tourists.

Halab (Aleppo) was the Mediterranean terminus of the Silk route from China. When the Ottoman Empire was split up, after the First World War, the region around Aleppo was divided between Turkey and Syria. Restored Halab would have a connection to the sea at Iskenderun (in Turkey) and Aleppo would again be a terminus for highways leading north, south, east and west. The bombing of Aleppo must cease immediately and interim power should devolve to the people who have been driving the ambulances, staffing the hospitals, reconnecting the power, water and sewage and keeping the roads open (whether they be Sunni, Shia, Christian, Jew or Kurd).

Terrorism is a consequence of the Syrian war; it did not cause it. Maps of ISIS held territory show lines through the Syrian Desert that are either roads or the Euphrates River (al Furat). Sunni tribes all the way from Jarabulus on the Turkish border to Ramadi and Fallujah near Baghdad largely control the millistate of Furat. The withdrawal of Assad’s forces from their last base in Dayr az Zawr would give the Sunni tribes control of this stretch of the Euphrates straddling the Sykes-Picot on the Iraq/Syria border.

North of Furat, on the border with Turkey, is the semi-autonomous region the Kurds call Rojava. There are about 40 million Kurds in the Middle East, enough for six or seven millistates on their own. History has drawn the red lines of national borders through the middle of their homelands, which straddle the borders of Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The Syrian army has all but withdrawn from Rojava and the Kurds there should be left to manage their own affairs – as they do in the Kurdish autonomous region of Northern Iraq.

Mr Chairman, members of the Security Council, our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. How right she is.

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Syria (part one)

Fred’s speech to the United Nations about the war in Syria

Mr Chairman

This speech marks the end of the two-year period in which New Zealand has been one of the ten elected members of the United Nations Security Council.

Last year New Zealand pointed out that the Security Council is an institution with failings. This year we go further and call the United Nations Security Council a failed institution. The problem is a structural one. The power of veto given to the five permanent members of the Security Council (USA, Russia, China, UK and France), merely because they were victors of the Second World War, means that the P5 negotiate positions before engaging us, the ten elected members, and that no action is taken if any one of the permanent five does not agree. This extraordinary imbalance of power is what is preventing action on Syria.

New Zealand challenges the authority of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council for reasons other than structural ones. The Russian Federation was not one of the winners of the Second World War, it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) who helped defeat Hitler’s Third Reich, therefore we challenge the right of Russia to be a permanent member of the security council.

Equally we question the right of the United States of America to still be a permanent member. The Security Council was originally set up to resolve conflicts and prevent wars such as we are seeing today in the Syria. Since the Second World War the USA has developed a massive global arms industry that has an economic interest in fuelling conflict, therefore we believe that America has lost any moral right to a permeant seat.

In summary New Zealand believes that the superpowers are part of the problem; that what we are seeing in Syria today is actually a proxy-war between Russia and America – the shared rationale being, to quote Henry Kissenger, “he who controls oil controls the world.”

Our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel.

Some of the causes for the war in Syria go can be traced back to the First World War and the division of the Ottoman Empire, but there are others. Resource depletion from overpopulation is one – although the Syrian birth rate has fallen from seven children per woman in the1960s to three at the present day. From 2006 to 2009 Syria experienced its worst drought in living memory resulting in a million pastoralists moving to the towns and cities, joining the 1.5 million refugees from the war in Iraq that Syria was already hosting. This contributed to overcrowding, worsening unemployment and rising tensions.

The first thing that is required on the ground is a nationwide ceasefire. The main suppliers of arms to the conflict are in order of magnitude, starting with the largest: America, Russia, China and then Israel (recently moving from position six to position four). If the flow of arms from the superpowers, either directly or indirectly, to the various factions in Syria were to stop then the conflict would simply run out of bullets and the process of reconstruction could begin – it is estimated that there are over a thousand different armed militias with constantly shifting alliances operating in Syria today.

The sheer complexity of the situation on the ground is compounded by various religious disputes. As the numerous sects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam embrace fundamentalism and then turn inhumanly on one another it is useful to remember that Moses, Jesus and Mohamed were all Middle Eastern Semites.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nations Security Council, thank you for giving us the time to present what we think are the causes of the awful conflict in Syria. Next week we will outline our plan to bring peace.